The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild

They couldn't have made it up,
couldn't have known what bleak peace
they would know communally
while the cold water they pass
through passes through them and when
it moves they move the same way.

And they don't know they're born, do
they, as ordinary and wild
as the shallow inshore tides
that bring them briefly landward
and have no need of words or
music to describe themselves.

Top 6 - Sean O'Brien

There wasn't long between me reading Sean O'Brien's poem, Latinists, in the Independent on Sunday's feature in the sometime early 90's and him taking up his place among my favourite poets. And its last lines (which I only look up here to be sure) have become a chiming model of great poetry for me ever since, describing the schoolmaster's reaction to the young Sean's much-vaunted lack of Latin acumen,

When the stare you award me

Takes longer than Rome did

To flower and vanish, I notice

The bells are not working in heaven today.

Brilliant. There is a strong-armed intensity about the way that O'Brien has made his way to a central position in the sometimes gang wars of English poetry, as critic, anthologist and academic that would be frightening if it wasn't backed up by some of the most memorable poems written in the period. His poetry, at its best, has the power and rancour to take the English tradition of Larkin, and before that, Edward Thomas, to something they seem to now call 'the next level'. It's a little bit cross about things- yes, that's fine- but being angry is no use if you can't show us what you're thinking.

In Somebody Else and Special Train, we are shown the aftermath of what might have been England, something we might have been able to be proud of. Thomas and Larkin and even Betjeman saw it going but O'Brien saw it gone, the de-personalized, alienated, self-accusing wilderness, as perhaps,

We have sat here at twenty past six

On the wrong side of England forever,

Like mad Mass Observers observing ourselves.

The late night watchman in Thrillers and Cheese has a clear view of this nightmare underside where some perception bubbles up like a nasty thing after dark but it is our fault, our complacency and (obviously) not Sean's.

But it's not so grim as to exclude wit and the seminal tour de force Piers Powerbook's Prologue is a 'state of the nation' address in the style of Piers Plowman taking an in-depth, runaround glimpse of corruption and a place gone to bad, which it has apparently been for at least 600 years. Which reminds me of the review of the selected poems in Cousin Coat that one magazine printed for me then (perhaps even paid me for) which discussed more poems that weren't selected than were.

And so, with only one choice left, I personally go for the well-done tribute to Thom Gunn, somehow inevitably, but for the way it makes use of so many essentially Gunn words in a Gunn form and looks back admiringly at one of our greater predecessors. It might be inter-textual, pastiche, studied and all of that but it's also excellent, felt, appropriate and beautiful.

Tony Williams - The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street

Tony Williams, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt)

It is said that a drowning man resurfaces twice before finally going under. Salt Publications have renewed their appeal to 'Buy One More Book' and so might be saved one more time before it all becomes too much.

But what spectacular optimism it ever was to run a press publishing poetry titles, with what unbridled derring-do did they take on the prevailing book market even in favourable conditions. And so I found that I could buy a book I wanted anyway and make myself feel good about it at the same time. One can't honestly be too hopeful for Salt in the long term, though, because in the double-dip parlous economy of a swingeing government, poetry sales are likely to suffer before those of, say, bread or water. But at least I know I've bought myself some goodwill and that when I'm reduced to my last rhymed couplet, the poetry world will remember my charity and rush to save me, too.

But the benefit for now is, of course, all mine. Tony Williams is a poet who cannot do without rhythm and rhythm is to poetry what the ball is to football, you can't do poetry without it or at least it isn't so attractive if you try. It will have to be said sooner or later- so why not now- that Williams is a disciple of the school of O'Brien, a mentor, influence and even reviewer of this debut collection. And I think we say this is 'school of' Sean rather than hommage or pastiche although it might be worthy of discussion where one ends and the next begins. Not only the built-in rhythmic patterns not always part of a uniformly stressed line but also the celebrations of nowheres, the nothingnesses of existentialism more than the being, refer back to the more senior bard of Northern post-ennui. It is the title poem that impresses most at first, the

atonal effegies of hymns to praise

the rain, and Nowhere breaking loose.

but the collection seems to have built to an accumulated vision of dilittante discomfiture with a piling up of powerful poems towards the end, the Late Schoolboys reworking one of Donne's most famous bits, In Praise of Tinkering wasting time elegantly and the absences of Hammershoi being as good a place to end as any.

Before that, we have piled up riffs on such themes as Matlock, a birthplace that stays with Williams as birthplaces stayed with other poets, like Larkin's Coventry but in more detail, or Tuesdays, in which I hope the reference to European Club football makes gestalted use of the televised, mind-numbing pointlessness of the group stages so that it is the European Cup that is being over-stretched and not the poem. Gravel and sand are other subjects for metaphysical contemplation but Williams delivers a more compact and lyrical caress to his downbeat soul in My Love. Reproductive Behaviour of the Dark is another piece that brings to mind the art of unnoticed places, like the instalments of Rachel Whiteread that represented the spaces under furniture. It is the art of nowhere, the unconsidered and the elsewhere and it gathers power as it reflects upon itself, as in the night-time foxes that inhabit the 'day-forsaken alleyways' among

all the violence that goes

unreported or is shelved for lack of evidence.

So it's a great bonus to be allowed to think one is saving the poetry publishing industry single-handedly while, in fact, Salt's renewed appeal has done me a favour by prompting me to buy this engaging book. It will be something to look forward to when Tony Williams, further down his own neglected branch line, gives us his difficult second album. Good writers usually improve and become themselves, moving beyond their first impulses and motivations and Williams brings plenty of himself to his chosen methods, making it reasonable for us to assume that he is a poet likely to take a place among those worth following.

Sebastian Horsley - Dandy in the Underworld

Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld (Pinnacle)

A few years ago I read a life of Baudelaire and was most disappointed. The delinquent poet had to spend most of his time writing begging letters before he could squander any money they brought forth. There is no such problem for Sebastian Horsley who had plenty of money to get through without having to worry where it had come from.

His account of his life up to his early forties starts in brilliantly witty form. An aunt lives to the age of 82 and then dies 'of embroidery'; his histrionic mother is the star of the first chapters, and 'Well, Jazz has a bad name because it's crap and boring you know' makes her the most astute jazz critic of all. Every page has a set piece of high camp wisdom and it looks like it's going to be an enjoyable 300 page romp.

Unfortunately it gets darker and not only because the action moves to Scotland and gets married. You're not likely to read a cheerful memoir by a heroin addict but Sebastian has self-lacerating ennui to perfection and every facet of debauchery is explored in gory detail. Not many of the most unnerving of these can be repeated here. But if Baudelaire was a bore with a big talent for writing, Sebastian is a great raconteur and genuinely nice bloke with apparently no talent but that for self-advertisement. He does run out of money in the end and is still musing on suicide a few years before his recent death, but mainly, one supposes, as a theme in his life-as-art performance. For one so superficial and cynical, he is a genuine and honest purveyor of inverted wisdom, apparently self-obessed but selfless, too.

His devotion to his wayward calling was all but complete with prostitutes, crucifixions and friends in low places. His final passing was inevitable, it would seem, leaving the beautiful corpse, the sanctified and demonized reputation and this guide book to the degradation that passeth all understanding.

Depravity is the soul of wit.

Michelucci - The Poetry of Thom Gunn

Stefania Michelucci, The Poetry of Thom Gunn (McFarland)

.

Judging this book by its excellent cover, one might be surprised to find that it makes only one passing reference to Thom Gunn's perfect early lyric, Tamer and Hawk. Instead of using Gunn's 'best' poems, the study makes most use of poems that provide the best fit with themes that Prof. Michelucci finds central to Gunn's ideas and so, in a way, it is a book less about the poetry of Thom Gunn than the intellectual ideas behind it. It consists of lengthy exegeses of the ideas in the poems rather than the way they are made into poems. These accounts are then augmented by extracts from other critics, sometimes the early study by Alan Bold that looked at Gunn and Hughes in turn which was valuable at the time but might have been superseded by other critiques by now.

Having also apparently accepted the idea, in August Kleinzahler's brilliant essay in his selection published by Faber, that the first two Gunn books, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, were 'apprenticeship' books, it refers back to these poems throughout as if those ideas were never really left behind.

It is surprising that having agreed that Positives, the collaboration with the photographs of his brother, Ander, was not his most successful poetry by any means that a chapter is devoted to it.

Gunn's poetry lends itself more than most to a chronological assessment because its thematic and stylistic development are so clear and closely linked and so although it is welcome and quite ambitious to make connections between the earliest and later work, the sense of development in this account is made partial.

Perhaps that is right. It is as much a part of Gunn's highly intellectual early verse that makes these interpretations of them somewhat heavy going and the reason it is now being seen as apprenticeship poetry is at least in part due to the rather stilted idiom of some of it. But Gunn is as fluent and verbally dextrous as any in his finest pieces and so it seems slightly peculiar to me that The Allegory of the Wolf Boy is made central to this study as opposed to, say, Touch.

But it raises an interesting question about what aspects of a poet's work are the crucial ones. Is it, in fact, the framework of ideas and a scrutiny of what might be the 'world-view' or is it the practice of translating them into poems.

Prof. Michelucci, in making so much use of the Wolf Boy poem, plus Waking in a Newly Built House, for example, makes Gunn into a poet of metamorphosis second only to Ovid and makes a perceived and obvious theme of 'duality' an ongoing motif throughout his work. And it isn't all sweetness and light, either, as her identification of 'the body' as a recurrent theme throughout the oeuvre includes the nightmares of the prison of Jack Straw's Castle and the Jeffrey Dahmer poems.

But none of any of this is necessarily a bad thing. It is only that it isn't much like the book on Gunn I left unfinished in 1999. There is a great deal to admire in its scholarly and thorough approach. The opening chapter on the Movement and the biographical outline are exemplary and the interview at the end contains much sense and wisdom from the poet. He points out that his generation, with Larkin and Hughes, were not reacting against previous generations of English poets but that they 'disregarded' the leading figures, just 'not taking any notice' of them. He is not interested in theory, or Language poets, or confessional ones. He insists on poems not working towards generalization but being about specifics. It is brilliant and common sense stuff until one sees him still in sympathy with Beat poets and, it has to be said, spending half of his teaching career on creative writing programmes, of which he makes a guarded defence.

He is also glad to be labelled 'Anglo-American' and thought to have slightly alienated critics and readers on both sides of the Atlantic by being so, the tremendous artistic advantages of not being associated easily with other poets in an identifiable group having worked against his marketability in all but the most discriminating places. But, good for him, that seems to worry his admirers more than it worries him and he genuinely seems not to have pursued a career as such, which must be a luxury afforded only to the brightest and best or the most avowedly amateur.

The tradition he belongs to is a much longer one, with inter-textual references to Donne, The Hug referring us back to The Extasie, or Old Meg to Keats' Meg Merrilies, the more obvious echoes of Yeats and Shakespeare and even Stephen Spender.

Stefania Michelucci has provided a generous and worthwhile account of Thom Gunn, the first 'full-length' such to appear in print. Gunn's strength might in the end turn out to come from the seemingly problematic point that he ultimately was differentiated from all schools and movements but was also a poet that brought many disparate threads of poetry together, from the Elizabethan to the formally iambic, through the syllabics of American modernism to a free verse that expressed various achieved freedoms. My one last big surprise in her book is that Prof. Michelucci doesn't make use of perhaps Gunn's finest late poem, The Butcher's Boy, that relates the joy of a father reunited with his son, thought lost in the war, which could be made to stand for what his best poetry does,

Like a light within the light

That he turned everywhere.

Top 6 - e.e.cummings

e.e. cummings was a teenage hero for me in the 70's, all idiosyncratic, experimental and strange but also whimsical, child-like and even sentimental as well as political. So it comes as some surprise to find how much I still like him now and how much of his poems has stayed with me.

So much of the poetry that claims to be ground-breaking and cutting edge and innovative is dull, almost dull for the sake of it as if weighed down by its own innovative seriousness but cummings retains the nursery rhyme innocence on the surface that so often covers a darker theme.

A favourite then which I must still pick now is the rhyming and scanning maggie and milly and molly and may in which molly is chased by a horrible thing but may finds a 'smooth round stone / as small as a world and as large as alone'.

In the greedy the people cummings offers us a version of his innocent world view in which 'they flock and they flee/ through a thunder of seem/ though the stars in their silence/ say Be.'

Obviously best known for his typographical innovation, l(a is a masterpiece, mingling the phrase 'a leaf falls' into the word 'loneliness' to considerable effect.

in Just- very nearly takes us further than one might want to go into whimsy and one can see why some adult readers who take themselves and their taste rather seriously might object to cummings but I think he's also expressing the wonder of childhood as well as indulging the nursery rhyme tendency and it is evocatively 'puddle-wonderful'.

mr youse needn't be so spry is philistine aesthetics with a fairly simple point to make and my father moved through dooms of love makes me wonder if there isn't some kinship with Dylan Thomas to be found in these poems. There really isn't such a thing as a one-off original even if cummings looks quite close to being one. He did make a unique contribution, though, and one I'm glad to find I haven't grown out of.

Philip Glass String Quartets

Philip Glass, String Quartets 1-4, Carducci Quartet, (Naxos)

Lots of Handel sounds like lots of other Handel and lots of Elgar sounds like other Elgar, etc. so it's quite likely that some Philip Glass will sound like other Philip Glass. His minimalist label can tempt people into thinking that his music is all repetitive and even more similar to itself than any other composer but less can be more in some respects and the opera Akhnaten and Violin Concerto, for examples, are glorious in very different ways.

On the other hand, it wasn't long before I was thinking that some of this music sounded like Glass's brilliant Solo Piano CD. I checked the sleeve notes and it makes no mention of it so perhaps some Philip Glass sounds like other Philip Glass.

By an unfair trick of programming here, the first quartet, which is much earlier (1966) is placed third so that having got into the film music, pulsing, meditating, leitmotifing its way merrily or thoughtfully along, one is suddenly taken back into a barer, less comforting world. It has more in common with earlier twentieth century modernism, spare and disturbed, post-holocaust. If it were film music, too, you would know the ghost was due to make an appearance. Like Arvo Part and John Tavener, as examples, Glass didn't arrive at his successful mature style immediately, then, and its informative to hear this early piece set amid its more harmomious successors.

Perhaps with his reputation going before him, Glass is not always given credit for the range of music he has produced and these four pieces are noticeably different in atmosphere and much less mechanised than the really repetitive material like, say, Dancepieces.

The Carducci Quartet make a fine sound in the acoustic of a Gloucestershire church. The CD is priced in typically Naxos fashion so it can't be any less than recommended.

Craig Raine - Heartbreak

Craig Raine, Heartbreak (Atlantic)

Last year Sean O'Brien published a debut novel and provided the quintessential O'Brien elements mixed into it. This year it's Craig Raine providing a book with his own fingerprints all over it. Neither book could have been by anybody else. Raine's offering even goes that extra mile to make you wonder if it's a novel at all, as one might expect of him. It has a central theme rather than central characters and could easily be mistaken for an essay, a meditation, a collection of short stories or an aesthetic tract.

And if the central theme is advertised romantically as heartbreak, it often looks more like jealousy.

A recurrent theme in Raine's poetry has been the strange appearance of genitalia, and there's plenty more of that here and when heartbreak is really only jealousy it is most often sexual jealousy. In the episodes described, one half of a sexual relationship moves on to another partner or tires of the besotted other.

Raine's writing, as ever, displays Raine's learning. Having been impressed once or twice, we are required to be impressed continually with modernist or late Romantic references. Taking this intertextuality to self-referential extremes, he even dares to include his own highbrow journal, Arete. It is all so clever and self-consciously clever that it is difficult to find it moving and yet in flashes, repeated flashes throughout, Raine's writing is brilliant in the very same way that his poetry was in his early 'Martian' mode,

He had the uneven wide thin lips of an alligator who has remembered a joke and is wondering whether to tell it.

Elsewhere Benjamin Britten's hair is,

Hard-wearing, waterproof hair for everyday use. Harris tweed for the head.

And he can do a nice line in jokes of a philosophical kind, as when talking about the one surviving Mozart Bassoon Concerto,

Two others have simply disappeared, with a trace. (Obviously, or we wouldn't know about them.)

By its fragmentary nature, its insistent intellectualism, almost worrying pre-occupation with sex and what it looks like, it is a difficult book to love and one admires it in parts rather than as a whole. That is until the last little story which occupies less than seven of these small and sparely-printed pages and heartbreak is finally achieved. It was just about worth waiting for.

Stanley Wells - Shakespeare & Co.

Not a new book by any means but a recommended one.

Stanley Wells, Shakespeare & Co. (Allen Lane)

It's possible that we spend too much time thinking of Shakespeare in isolation and not as part of the theatrical world of London as one among many. Stanley Wells' book here makes him central to the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre but relates him to his contemporaries and gives us a better idea of context and the business of play-making at the time.

In the early 1590's, Marlowe is the already established star and such names as Nashe, Lyly and Greene are famous names. Wells takes us through the careers, lives and work of Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson before Shakespeare works with the next generation, Thomas Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher and John Webster, Philip Massinger and one Wentworth Smith who I felt particularly sorry for because none of his plays have survived.

Sometimes one begins to wonder how many times one is going to be told the various anecdotal reports of Shakespeare's life - William the Conqueror coming before Richard the First, etc. - but of course each book must be written as if it is the first book that the reader has read on the subject. I was as grateful for all those stories several years ago as I am now for some of the less well-known reports from the lives of his contemporaries. I'm sure that some of our leading artists in the twentieth century led fulfilled and exciting lives but it's hard to see any bunch of writers as being quite as colourful as this lot. I'm usually tempted to see Shakespeare as having had a varied and interesting sex life but otherwise being a restrained and responsible character. Among this cast of brothel-keepers, spies, murderers and duellers, he looks like a paragon of virtue.

Thomas Middleton recovers from the juvenilia of The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased, described by one critic as 'the most damnable piece of flatness that has ever fallen in my way', to be working with Shakespeare by his mid-twenties as well as producing numerous titles that have survived, The Revenger's Tragedy being potentially the most interesting but the social satires such as A Chaste Maid on Cheapside somehow characteristic, with the similarities in Timon of Athens being enough to convince one of the likely collaboration. But the recommendation that comes out of this book most fervently is to read his collaboration with Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, based on the true life Mary Frith, a London character 'also known as Moll Cutpurse, a woman who dressed as a man and pursued a flamboyant and criminal lifestyle.' It is reported that at a play she,

told the company there present that she thought many of them were of opinion that she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should find out that she is a woman.

Besides these lively accounts, Wells provides a chapter on the actors, equally important influences on the plays at the time as the plays would often be written with them in mind. And he examines several textual parallels between plays by Shakespeare and others, some of which are clearly conscious references while others more likely to be borrowed or recycled. It is the sort of thing that supporters of Oxford and Marlowe's authorship claims have seized on keenly as proof of their cases. However, it is shown here to be a common occurence and not a phenomenon limited to one other author and so redundant as an argument. Wells makes various academic points about them but it is otherwise not a fearsomely academic read and likely, one would think, to be a very useful and authoritative introduction to the milieu.